1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the harvesting of trees and the immediate conversion of felled trees into wood chips, and more particularly to a new and novel mobile device for felling, chipping, storing, hauling, and transferring wood fiber.
2. Related Art
Chips of wood are valuable as a fuel, as a raw material for paper mills, and as a mulch for gardening operations. Brush and trees, which are too small to be used as lumber or are not suited for pulp products, are often removed and disposed of at great expense because they hinder the planting of seedling pine trees by standing in the way of land development or because they are stealing nutrients from another more desired species of trees.
One conventional process used to remove trees from a site is by using standard logging skidders and feller bunchers in conjunction with a centrally located whole tree chipper which injects finished chips into accompanying tractor trailer vans. This conventional method has many disadvantages when compared to the feller-chipper of the instant application. These are as follows:
1. In a conventional harvesting operation, each individual tree is handled by equipment at least three times costing time, fuel, and wear; whereas, with a feller-chipper trees are only handled once.
2. Because the feller-chipper operation requires less manpower than the conventional operation, there are fewer labor problems.
3. The feller-chipper operation has a lower overhead, capital cost, and scale thereby allowing improved efficiency due to the owner-operators incentive being able to more completely influence operation.
4. The skidding phase of a conventional operation introduces dirt into the chipper which quickly dulls the chipper blades, while the skidding phase is completely eliminated with the feller-chipper operation.
5. Operator comfort and productivity is enhanced with the feller-chipper as the operator's cab is situated behind everything he is concerned with during operation, and the feller-chipper will not be moving quickly through the woods as in the case of a skidder.
6. The feller-chipper operation does less damage to the ground cover than does the conventional operation; this helps to prevent damaging soil erosion. Also, the preserved ground cover enhances vehicle flotation.
7. The feller-chipper allows for more fiber recovery and land clearing savings on smaller tracts of land than does conventional whole tree chipping due to lower transport costs and lower downtime overhead costs.
8. The conventional operation by nature consists of duplicated equipment and services which make it inefficient in comparison to the feller-chipper operation which accomplishes several tasks with the same piece of equipment.
9. By turning the wood fiber into chip form early in the harvesting process, wood handling costs decrease due to the efficiency inherent in handling wood chips.
Another conventional method used to remove unwanted trees has been to physically uproot them with construction equipment and haul them off site or burn them on site. By this method, no fiber value is recovered, and therefore the site preparation is a pure expense to the developer or to the landowner. The feller-chipper operation offers more positive economics.
Examples of tree chippers are found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,661,333, 3,955,765 and 4,390,132. Each of these patents show prior types of feeding and chipping apparatus, with U.S. Pat. No. 3,955,765 illustrating the typical hydraulic means of feeding the whole tree into the chipper. In each instance, the tree feller is a separate and distinct mobile unit from the mobile chipper.